I have an old Bluray internal drive that does not support UHD/4k (hardware limitation – this drive predates UHD/4K availability in consumer devices). To be able to view them on my machines, I ended up purchasing an AmazonBasics external UHD/4k capable drive. This drive turns out to be a rebadged LG BP60NB10. While the drive may very well play UHD/4K out of the box with Windows only software, making it work with Linux required some fiddling around. These are the steps to follow to make this drive capable of playing UHD/4K on Linux (this assumes you already have working libaacs, libbluray installation that allows you to play 1080p discs):
- Install MakeMKV
- Download sdf.bin and DE_LG_BP60NB10_1.02-MK.bin (you can find links in the MakeMKV forums)
- Run this command (replace
/dev/sr1with the right device name for your external drive)
makemkvcon f -d /dev/sr1 -f ./sdf.bin rawflash main -i DE_LG_BP60NB10_1.02-MK.bin
- Now your drive is Libredrive enabled – which means you can play many UHD/4K discs in VLC/Handbrake if you have the key database configured. For those discs that don’t have a key in the key database you’ll need to use MakeMKV or similar software to enable decryption and playback of the discs.
Here are some of the links that are useful:
The command now would be
makemkvcon f -d /dev/sr1 -f ./sdf.bin rawflash enc -i DE_LG_BP60NB10_1.02-MK.bin
for any newer drives, as they use encrypted firmware. “main” is simply substituted for “enc” compared to your command. Sdf.bin is available form https://makemkv.com/sdf.bin The all you need firmwarepack is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HRnbXiM8TkwcAcvqYFR31bbJsEZ0FCdM/view?pli=1 or check the forum thread for updated files: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634
Posting this here as this is a high up google search result for flashing drives under linux, and the makemkv forums leves something to be deired when it comes to navigating